“Academic disciplines have become so specialized in recent years that scholars‘ ideas reach only a narrow audience. Until scholars can reach a wider audience, their ideas will have little use.”
近些年来,学科已经细化到了相当的程度以至于学者们的理念只影响小范围的人群。除非学者们能拥有影响等大范围的人群,否则他们的理念将几乎毫无用处。
正文:
Although academic disciplines have become so specialized in recent years, scholars’ ideas can still reach a wide audience by the advantage of the knowledge structure. We can simply put that it is the human beings‘ knowledge structure that makes it possible for a scholar’s ideas in his specialized discipline to reach a much wider audiences who don‘t necessarily belong to his own discipline.
The reason why I draw this conclusion will be illustrated by recalling the process of social evolution.
During the passed centuries, the social economy has been greatly boosted by the revolutions in science and technology, which in turn increases the width and depth of academic disciplines to solve unencountered and more complex problems arising in the new situations. To solve new problems, we probably need new methods. That will undoubtedly calls for invention of new ideas, which will certainly adds to human beings’ knowledge. Thus with the progress of science and technology, more and more knowledge will be added to the old system. A new problem will come: how the newly obtained knowledge is organized. This problem will be clear when we make classification of the new knowledge according to the old knowledge system. If there is content of the newly-get that doesn‘t properly belong to any sort of the old system, it means a new discipline will emerge. But could we just assert that the newly formed discipline doesn’t possess any relationship with any of the old ones? Certainly not. This is because the new knowledge is obtained through the old methods, which obviously means the new knowledge do have some connections with some old disciplines, otherwise I am quite sure we could not find it!
From the above, we can easily reach the conclusion that every academic discipline has certain relationships with some other ones. The structure of human‘s knowledge is just like the complexity of a net! And also it is a natural trend that academic disciplines become more and more specialized.
With the depositing and specializing process of knowledge, it causes humans to accommodate themselves to this situation. Because the God gives every person a limited time and energy, it is necessary for a person, who wants to make progress in his discipline, to adjust his knowledge structure to adapt to his research domain, that is to say, to be more devoted to his own research area. On the other hand, if he cares too much for unrelated or less related area, he will probably not be able to bring innovation to his main academic discipline. Simply put, we almost cannot find a man who constructs the Theory of Relativity and in the mean time composes symphony like Mozart’s! So we can say every scholar must be more devoted to his own discipline than to others, but a wider knowledge of other disciplines sometimes involuntarily invokes sparks of new ideas.
The structure of human knowledge is just like the complexity of a net, which means various disciplines have interconnections and a progress in one will undoubtedly bring changes to some others, which is because scholars belonging to related areas will probably get useful implication from progress happened in this one. And with this similar process going further, innovations may occur in several other disciplines, which will even bring forth new disciplines. It is obvious that scholars‘ ideas can reach a wide audience by the advantage of the knowledge structure without necessarily reaching wider audiences directly.